Friday, 6 May 2016

#54: Legend Of Zagor

LEGEND OF ZAGOR

Ian Livingstone

Reviewed by Mark Lain

Part 3 of the
Zagor series of books (the previous instalments being The Warlock of Firetop Mountain and Return to Firetop Mountain), Legend
of Zagor was part of a high concept multi-format event consisting of this
book, an elaborate (and expensive at £49.99) Parker board game, and the
four-part The Zagor Chronicles series
of non-interactive novels. All were independent of one-another in as much as
none were reliant on, or required, the others to play/read/understand, although
prior knowledge of the novels can aid in navigating certain parts of the
gamebook, the board game and gamebook follow very similar design structures,
and the overall story arc is generally the same across all three formats. Indeed,
the gamebook and board game involve YOU playing out the plot of specifically
the second Zagor Chronicles novel, Darkthrone, which involves a group of
four adventurers making their way through Castle Argent in a bid to hunt down
and kill Zagor who, due to a technical error in trapping a Bone Demon in the
Casket of Souls, has been released into the castle in demon form.

For several
reasons, the nature of the overall plot concept means that this gamebook is
unlike any other FF book published. Most strikingly unique is that YOU play one
of four pre-defined characters: Anvar the barbarian, Braxus the warrior,
Stubble the dwarf, or Sallazar the wizard. This is both problematic and of
benefit – it is a problem as YOU are not the hero, instead YOU are someone
else; it is a benefit as it allows for numerous interesting changes to the
dynamics and creation of your character. Each of the four has different
strengths and weaknesses, and the adventure, whilst fundamentally the same, has
key differences dependant on whom you are:

Anvar
cannot be hurt by the plethora of door traps scattered about the castle, but he
struggles with wearing armour which limits the combat bonuses available to him
by finding any armour and he is useless with a crossbow

Stubble
is normally able to avoid taking full damage from projectiles/missiles because
they tend to go over his head as he’s short, he is naturally luckier than the
others so has the potentially highest starting Luck of the four, he gets more
starting gold also as dwarves covet gold, he has a natural advantage when
fighting any foe that is made of stone, but he can fall foul of the
inter-racial dwarf-elf antagonism problem, his essential magical weapon is far
harder to acquire than those of the other three, he can only wear special
small-sized dwarf armour (there is only one set available that fits him) and
can’t use larger or clumsy types of weapons

Braxus
has no obvious things in his favour or against him, other than that his
adventure is comparatively un-nuanced due to this

Sallazar
is most affected by the text (especially in the earlier stages), can use
various spells contained in the Amarillian Grimoire (although the use of this
is limited by his Magic Points and the fact that his combat spells require him
to first win an Attack Round before he can use any of them), he gets a natural
advantage in Spot Skill tests, can occasionally teleport to avoid some of the
more difficult combats (in particular, the Orc throne room which involves
fighting 11 compulsory enemies), but he gets no armour or large weapons, has
severe starting stat penalties, and is likely to die very quickly if you play
as him as he is easily the physically weakest of the four

When
initially rolling up each character it quickly becomes apparent which ones will
make for an easier or harder gaming experience. Starting stat ranges for each
character are: Anvar - Skill 7-12, Stamina 19-24, Luck 5-10; Braxus – Skill
7-12, Stamina 14-24, Luck 4-9; Stubble – Skill 6-11, Stamina 14-24, Luck 6-11;
Sallazar – Skill 5-10, Stamina 9-24, Luck 4-9. It does not take a genius to see
that playing as Anvar or Braxus is easiest (Braxus edges it as the overall
easiest due to Anvar’s disadvantages above), Stubble whilst statistically a
decent character gets a rough deal as his adventure is probably the trickiest
due to the difficulty in getting his magic sword, but poor old Sallazar is all
but useless due to having desperately low starting stats and rarely being able
to use his combat magic “advantage” as he’s not going to be winning many Attack
Rounds. On the plus side though, having four characters to choose from gives
you four subtly different adventures to play out meaning there is lots of
replay potential in this book, even if I doubt anyone can win fairly with
Sallazar (and maybe not with Stubble either.)

As
this is one of the complex 50s-series books, the rules do not stop at the
differences between the four characters you have to choose from and, overall,
this is an extremely complex book by FF standards. You start out with 12
Provisions but you are regularly forced to eat or suffer a Stamina penalty, so
this seemingly generous offering is far from that. Yes, you can get extra food
along the way and it is possible to completely avoid the forced eating later in
the book if you find a particular object, but overall the sheer amount of
force-feeding will quickly deplete your supplies of food. Unusually for FF you
start with two weapons – in addition to a character-defined weapon (axe, sword,
staff, etc) you also get a back-up knife which you can use to fight with (although
it only does 1 Stamina of damage) if you lose your main weapon. This is a nice
touch as it decreases your vulnerability and still gives you a slight hope in
combat situations. Each character starts with a certain number of Magic Points
dependant on their character type (Sallazar naturally has far more than any of
the other three, but as some spells will use 4 or 5 points even this is not
much of an advantage for him) and these can be used to charge certain magic
items that can be found along the way. I found this one of the hardest rules to
remember to incorporate and it seems clumsy and over-complicated, even though
it does add RPG-style realism to the proceedings. Finally, there is the matter
of the Tower Chests. Finding these is the crux of the adventure itself – each
time you find one you must Test Your Luck (and lose 3 Stamina if unlucky due to
them being booby-trapped), then you roll one die to determine if you have found
a Golden Talisman (each one you have reduces Zagor’s Skill by 1) or a Silver
Dagger (which reduce Zagor’s Stamina by 1 for every one you’ve got), and then
you regain the just-used Luck point for finding a Tower Chest. Given that Zagor
has Sk 16 St 20 there is no question that the Golden Talismans are rather more
useful in the final showdown with him than the Silver Daggers as you really do
not want Zagor winning any Attack Rounds due to the sheer damage he will deal
you (see below), but, without any of either you simply have no real chance of
defeating him so you have to get as many as possible and the text does lay this
fact on pretty thickly. You also need to try to find Magic Rings as each gives
you +1 Magic Points and makes using magic items rather easier (of key
importance as it is not possible to win without a magic sword.) Finally, the
first part of the Castle also contains several creatures that can afflict you
with different types of Plagues, without finding the antidotes to which you are
screwed, but there are several ways of getting the antidotes so this is more of
a hindrance than a real obstacle to completion.

The
Tower Chest and Magic Ring concepts contribute to the most jarring aspect of
this adventure. As you wander around trying to find and collect these items you
rapidly start to feel like you are token-hunting in readiness for the final
battle with Zagor and, by all accounts, that is exactly what you are doing. If
we think too about the way the book is designed something begins to become
starkly apparent. The body of the adventure (excepting the initial and final
short sections) involves YOU entering a central area on a given level wherein
you are presented with a frankly bewildering list of options to go through
doors or along passages. You are then free to visit all or as few of these
options as you wish (and in any order, although you will have to return to
complete some having acquired information or items from others) before moving
on to another level which will offer you another catalogue of doors and
passages to explore. There are in total 15 of these areas to visit making this
seem little more than a repetitive and seemingly never-ending cycle of the same
basic thing with no real variation until you reach the final episode and take
on Zagor’s two guardians followed by the man himself. It is difficult to
visualise this structure as anything other than the layout of a traditional
board game in text form and it can get very dull very quickly due to
this. Likewise, as you often need to backtrack, mapping is absolutely essential
otherwise you have little hope of navigating forwards and backwards through the
onslaught of mind-bogglingly similar locations. Low and behold, as you draw out
your map you find yourself drawing out the plan of a board game, with emphasis
on the word “board/bored”!

Not
only does this design approach make playing this book a pretty torturous
ordeal, but it also means that any sense of plot is quickly lost amidst the sea
of mostly anonymous doors and passages. This problem is all the more
disappointing as the opening section starts extremely well with a background
taking in the plot of Ian Livingstone’s Casket
Of Souls as well as that of the first Zagor
Chronicles novel, Firestorm.
Sadly, whilst the adventure is, as we have said, the plot of ZC#2 Darkthrone
in game form, it is dumbed-down in its presented form and, in spite of the
events and encounters being taken straight from the book (as well as some of
the solutions) it is not long before any semblance of an ongoing storyline goes
out of the window as the execution is just so turgid. Yes, some elements of the
novel would not translate well (especially Anvar being a werewolf as that would
take the already dense rules well beyond manageability), but to reduce what
could have been an increasingly more foreboding ascent of the castle to a
series of door-opening choices is a major own goal. Curiously, the final
section where you must deal with Zagor’s end bosses (a Mummy and a War Dragon),
followed by Zagor himself picks up again and is quite exciting, but it comes
far too late for redemption which is a pity as, interestingly, the intro and
final sections do knit together very neatly as you use info gleaned at the
start to overcome the very last part where you have to throw the dead Zagor
into the Heartfires within a time limit.

There
is of course a pay-off to be had from the board game layout of this book. It
is, in theory, possible to go just about everywhere in the castle assuming you
do not die and/or your character is specifically precluded from accessing a
particular place or encounter - a feature which only really affects the
locations of each character’s magic sword, although there are a few other minor
restrictions here and there too. In this sense, this is the most RPG-ish of all
the FF books and you can roam more or less freely. This means that the usually
soul-destroying “instant failure due to being missing an item“ points are
largely eliminated as you can go back and try to find certain key items to
access the next level barring combats that require magic weapons although, as
these are very pivotal moments, I can accept this one concession when the rest
of the castle exploration is so freeform. An observation at this point would be
that, given just how much you are expected to remember and integrate, in
another RPG link, this would benefit from using a DM if only to manage all the
factors and play conditions that develop along the way as it does become quite
confusing.

Given
the design and approach of this book, this is a very ambitious undertaking and
is only really fully appreciated if you do take the time to really scrutinise
and absorb the rules as well as mapping the dungeon out at which point you will
see how the castle sections interlink and how the encounters and episodes
unfold. Sadly, the dullness of the playing experience is not likely to show any
of this to very good effect and another problem with this book is that its
crushing level of difficulty dawns more and more on you as you bumble onwards
through its doors and corridors. It has to be said that every character except
Sallazar has a decent chance of reaching fairly far into the dungeon as long as
info from previous playthroughs is used to help to avoid dealing with too many
of the very tough encounters that can practicably be avoided. There are of
course some compulsory very tough fights (the Orc throne room is especially
gruelling, although the pathetic Sallazar is unique in being able to avoid this
part) and the dungeon is riddled with some very old school FF dungeon traps to
catch you out. Whilst there is also the obstacle of the plagues in the earlier
sections and frequent poisonings throughout, the overall factor contributing to
this book’s difficulty level is the sheer number of battles to fight (necessary
or otherwise, given that some are character-exclusive and others you will just
stumble across, especially in early playthroughs) with special foes that have powerful
combat adjustors:

Plague
Bearer – only Sk 5 St 4 but gives you the plague if it even wounds you only
once

Sir
Davian - Sk 12 St 16 and you are better off talking to him instead of killing
him but he’s very strong if you do feel like trying to bump him off

The
Orc throne room – a sequence of four consecutive fights, each with a pair of
Orcs, each pair of which is increasingly tougher than the last, culminating in
a pair with Sk 8 St 12. Deal with these and you then must fight their leader,
Thulu, who has Sk 9 St 17

Plague
Zombie – Sk 7 St 6 but gives you a more lethal form of the plague than the
Plague Bearer, again if it even wounds you only once

Mungus
– a massive jailer (who looks like Peter Vaughan) that has Sk 7 St 19 and does
you -3 St damage with each blow

Two
Castle Imps – very weak within themselves but, as you fight them in a cramped
passageway all but Stubble suffer harsh Attack Strength penalties (Anvar -4,
Braxus -3, Sallazar -2)

Fog
Wyvern – can be completely avoided by sacrificing a Luck point but, if you
don’t do this (and it comes before you even enter the castle!) you encounter it
and it fights with Sk 10 St 16

Wizard-Ghost
– Sk 9 St 10 but for the first two Attack Rounds he casts a fire spell which,
if he hits you either or both rounds, does you -4 St damage for each successful
blow

Chaos
Champion – St 10 St 15 and you must roll an extra die each time it wins an AR
to see what extra damage it does you, ranging from an additional Stamina point,
through Initial Stamina or Luck
penalties, up to Magic Point penalties or it going completely berserk and
taking 2d6 of Stamina off you!

Stone
Colossus – Sk 8 St 18, if it hits you roll a die and it does you -3 St damage
on a 5 or 6 roll, plus if you roll an 11 or 12 for its AS you must spend a
Magic Point to avoid being turned to stone by its whip that is made from
basilisk leather

Elranel
the Thief – another NPC that should be spoken to rather than fought but, should
you fight him, he has Sk12 St 13, you fight with -1 AS unless you have a Ring
of Truesight as he is only semi-visible due to a cloak he wears, and his
poisoned dagger inflicts –3 St

Giant
Stone Golem – Sk 9 St 16 but he can at least be hit by all types of weapon

Grool,
a massive mutant Ogre with Sk 9 St 22

Mutant
Chaos Ogre – Sk 7 St 14 and you must roll a die after every AR regardless of
who won each one, roll a 6 and you take an automatic -3 St as it spits
corrosive acid at you

Hellhorns
x2 – both Sk 9 St 10 but if you are hit you must roll a die to determine damage
taken, a 1 is the saving grace of only causing you -1 St damage, but you could
also lose 2 St and 2 Sk, or even 4 St;
there’s also a tougher Hellhorn Champion with Sk 10 St 16 that does the same
randomised damage on each hit

Air
Elemental – Sk 12 St 15, cannot be fought with non-magical weapons and you
start on the backfoot if you lose an opening Luck test

Spectre
– Sk 10 St 14, cannot be fought with non-magical weapons and, if it gets even
one hit on you, you roll a die and any roll other than a 6 causes you to lose 1
point from your current and InitiaI
Skill scores

Young
War Dragon – St 10 St 16 and if it wins an AR you roll one die, a 5 or 6
meaning you are burned by its breath and you lose 4 St

Great
Mummy, the first of Zagor’s end guardians – Sk 10 St 22, no special attacks,
just really strong!

War
Dragon, #2 of Zagor’s end guardians – Sk 15 St 20 and if it wins an AR you roll
a die and it causes you anywhere from 1 to 4 St damage

The
Zagor-Demon – oh God, where do we begin! He has Sk 16 St 20 and you can shave
points off him for each Golden Talisman or Silver Dagger you have, plus you can
choose to attack with different special weapons (if you have any) in each
round, however, if he hits you... his 1st hit does you an insane -7
St damage, the 2nd an equally grim -5 St damage, the 3rd
costs you 1 Sk and 2 St, the 4th and 5th hit you for -3
St until, finally, from the 6th hit onwards you “only” lose the
standard 2 Stamina! Let’s face it given his Skill, even in reduced form you are
going to take some serious damage here!

Admittedly,
by no means are all of these combats essential to victory, but the Great Mummy,
War Dragon, and obviously Zagor all are, plus several others will be too,
making this a rather depressingly long list of uber-tough baddies to try to
defeat. It’s only fair to add that combats in the early stages of the book (bar
the Fog Wyvern which is only a few sections in) are relatively easy (Skills of
8-ish, Staminas in a similar ballpark) but the list above is easily 75% of all
the battles in here!

Whilst the mostly
ridiculously-strong foes will cause you by far the biggest problem in beating this
book, most of the other aspects of its design will not cause a seasoned FF
player too many problems, especially as instant deaths are very few and far
between (because they aren't needed, given that the combats will almost certainly kill you eventually.) There are a lot of mathematical cheat-proofing moments throughout that
involve converting names, section numbers where you found things, the material
a bridge is made from, and even the first four letters of four gems into hidden
paragraph numbers that can have anything from a limited impact on you (an item
that gives you a certain combat bonus may be accessed, for example) through to
a critical one (such as the dragon keys that open the door to the final
section.) Whilst there are some essential items to find (the magic sword for
your chosen character being the primary example), many items are curatives or
bonus-givers that affect whatever you have allowed (or will allow) yourself to
be exposed to along the way and the book’s non-linear design works in your
favour as it removes the many critical fail points that almost all gamebooks
will scupper you with. Indeed, there is no true path to find with repeated
playthroughs, the trick here is more to use knowledge gained in previous failed
attempts mainly to avoid as many crushing encounters and Stamina-sapping traps as
you realistically can. There are a generous two options to have a companion NPC
come along part of the way with you and both of these can be very useful in
easing the pressure on you, especially in preserving your Skill and Stamina for
the final three mega-fights. There is no doubt that starting Luck scores can be
desperately low but the emphasis on testing Luck is very sparing, instead there
is a huge focus on Skill testing, often with deadly or severe penalties for
failure and you have no chance without a decent starting Skill (another reason why
being Sallazar is a lost cause.) The sheer volume of Skill (and Spot Skill for
noticing things) tests is as tediously repetitive as the catalogue of
identical-sounding locations and this too can make this all rather thuddingly
dull. That said, everyone except Sallazar has decent opportunities to raise
their Attack Strengths along the way ready for the later combats, meaning your
Skill limitations will impact Skill tests more than anything else. Interestingly,
once you have bested Zagor (when you finally ever do!) you have to go through a
lengthy time-controlled trip back through the castle to the Heartfires where
you have to hurl his body into the flames to destroy it for good. As this is
restricted to being completed in a certain maximum number of seconds, this makes
an already crazily tough final part of a very hard book even more difficult.
Whilst this is well-deployed (you choose actions and are told how long each takes
which allows you to keep a running total of seconds you have used) it can seem
a bridge too far in a) difficulty and b) even more extra rules you have to
contend with.

A discussion
of this book would not be complete without discussing the question of its
authorship. As it stands it is credited to Ian Livingstone, however there is
little of his style on show here. Yes it’s very hard, yes there are lots of
items to find and, yes, there are many fiendish traps, all of which are IL
trademarks. In every other way though, this plays out like a Keith Martin book
with its number-crunching puzzles, poisons/plagues, the need for a magic sword,
dark atmosphere, demands on the player to remember to factor in things like
rope lengths and the need to collect empty bottles along the way to use later
on, the style of the final battle where umpteen items need to be used to affect
you and your foe’s base Attack Strengths, and the subversion of the major IL
mechanic of true path linearity. In 2014 it finally came out that this book was
indeed written by KM rather than IL, but it would be hard to think otherwise
even without knowing this! To continue in that vein, the Zagor Chronicles novels were written by IL and Carl Sargent. Keith
Martin is CS’ pen-name so it all begins to make sense that KM wrote Legend of Zagor too. It is worth
mentioning that, whilst the gamebook follows the plot of Darkthrone, one major feature is changed in that Sallazar is dead
in the novel and he is replaced by his sister, Jallarial. This is a little
frustrating as Jallarial was the most three-dimensional of all the novel’s characters
but, as the novel came out a few months after the gamebook this might actually be
an in-joke to remind us just how likely to be dead Sallazar is if you have
tried to play as him! Another interesting difference in the cross-format event
that these books were part of is that all the central locations that all the
doors and passages radiate out from are named differently in the gamebook to
those in the board game which isn’t a problem I just thought it worth
mentioning.

If we can see
beyond the motivation-destroying way that the castle is presented to us in this
book, it is actually designed in a pretty convincing manner map-wise. Some
rooms are empty, some are trashed, some have Orcs squatting in them etc and
this suits the concept of the castle having been over-run by an evil hoard.
Similarly, everyone you meet has a real reason to be there and this is not just
a randomly assembled dungeon with disparate and inexplicable people and
locations scattered about it. The way everything fits the plot and context is
very well thought-out, so it’s even more of a shame that it just all seems the
same when you try to play through it all. The encounters can be quite
interesting, but the way to reach them combined with the inevitability of yet
another impossible fight coming sooner or later combine to make this book a
very long, excessively repetitive, and often arduous slog.

Not
only is this structurally and conceptually unique within the FF series, but it
is also the only FF gamebook to be set in the parallel universe of Amarillia. There
is a brief linking nod to Titan in the intro when Yaztromo gives you your
mission via a Jedi-style holo-communication thing direct from Allansia and this
helps this seem less cut-off from the FF world, but fundamentally the only recurring
link is via Zagor himself. Rather awkwardly though, in spite of this being the
third book in the Zagor gamebook cycle, there is scant reference made to the
previous two. Zagor has a treasure chest and his power comes from a deck of cards
again as was the case in WOFM, and
the only surviving part of his pre-Demon incarnation is his skeletal left arm
(a reference to the closing lines of Return
to Firetop Mountain), but otherwise this book seems to care little that
there were two instalments before it. Whilst I do not see this as a fault in
how the game plays, it is definitely a failing in maintaining the ongoing
mythos of FF’s first and most famous baddie. The character you play cannot be
expected to make links between the three books as you play a fresh protagonist
that has never known of Zagor before. For you as the player, though, strong
inter-connecting threads between the three parts of the saga should be a comforting
necessity that is sadly absent.

Few
gamebook fans could disagree that Martin McKenna is an exceptional fantasy artist
whose work verges on the darker (horror) side of the fantasy spectrum. His work
here is as excellent as ever and many of the tougher foes look truly terrifying
and awe-inspiring (the Chaos Champion, for example.) It is interesting to note
that, in places, McKenna apes others’ work (which he often did in other FFs
particularly by drawing influences from Hammer Films) and, whilst there is
nothing here lifted from Hammer, the Orc throne room is a literal copy of Iain
McCaig’s version from Casket of Souls
and the Chaos Champion looks strikingly like the LJN-produced Advanced Dungeons & Dragons action
figure called Warduke. The cover intentionally parallels that of the board game
and I acknowledge that this is a marketing necessity to sell units of the book
to the board game fans and vice versa, especially as the book cost less than
1/10th of the board game’s asking price! Incidentally, by the time
Wizard’s reissue came out this was no longer a consideration and their rather
terrifying hellish red demon cover reflects the impact of Zagor’s demon form
and is ultimately more effective for this.

This
is a frustrating gamebook for so many reasons and it is simultaneously one of
the best and one of the worst FFs ever. Primarily in its favour are its
logicality, the variety inherent in the different character choices, the
totally free-form non-linear way that it plays, and the fact that you don’t keep
losing at key equipment checkpoints where you are instead able to return to a
previous place and keep hunting for whatever it is you need to move onto the
next part. Weighing heavily against it is the extreme difficulty of the combats,
the boring and endlessly samey presentation of the dungeon, and its sheer
length (a playthrough from start to finish is easily a three or four hour
sitting) if you do choose to take the explorative approach which you need to do
if you want the maximum amount of firepower against Zagor at the end. The
unbalanced nature of the characters is also a problem and playing as Sallazar
only has one real saving grace in that it keeps the adventure short when he
dies very quickly! Personally I’d suggest that Stubble makes for the most
satisfying experience due to the influence his size can have on events, but, of
the three characters that can actually win in real terms, his adventure is
rather tougher than either Anvar’s or Braxus’, making for an even more insanely
difficult gamebook. Overall, I’d say that the initial lure of more Zagor
quickly wears off and that this book’s good points do not get enough chance to
shine through what is essentially little more than a very boring, stupidly hard,
and very long board game in print format.

I must hand it to you Mark, that's about as thorough a dissection as I've ever read of a FF book. Its true that Keith Martin's adventures are notoriously hard to complete with possibly SIEGE AT SARDATH the hardest of all. ( and one you have yet to review )

Difficult , long and complex , even frustrating. All of these can be applied to a KM book but ' boring ' is not one I'd use !

Doesn't the Plague Bearer win automatically just be winning a single attack round? I remember that the text says that if it wins an attack round: "the touch of the horror turns you into *a plague bearer" forced to turn other poor wretches into diseased wanderers. Your adventure ends here."